What other factors make us eat more irrespective of how food actually tastes?
Most people believe we overeat because we’re really hungry or the food tastes really good. But we show in study after study that that is not that case. If you go to a movie theater, everything says, eat, even if you’re not hungry, and even if the food tastes bad. The size of the bucket says “eat more.” The noise of the people eating around you says “eat more,” the distraction of the movie says “eat more,” and the person you’re sitting with, if they’re still eating, tells you to “eat more.” In one experiment, even when we gave people really stale popcorn, even though they’d just eaten, and even though it was terrible, they still ended up eating it. Our studies found that people given a large bucket ate 51 percent more calories than those who were given a medium bucket. We eat with our eyes, not with our stomach. One experiment we’ve done in this realm is with a refillable soup bowl. We found that people eating from the refillable bowl ate 73 percent more soup. What is a refillable soup
